Fox just racked up "The Hustler" for a Blu-ray release keyed to Fathers Day. New supplements to the title include the documentaries "Paul Newman at Fox," "Jackie Gleason: The Big Man" and "The Real Hustler: Walter Tevis." The other extra features appear to date back to the 2002 and 2007 DVD releases. Robert Rossen directed with style, daring … [Read more...]
Archives for April 2011
Xbox Kinects with Netflix
Netflix is now at your voice command -- on the Xbox 360. The Kinect-Xbox upgrade finally has gone live. It allows owners of the game console who also have Kinect sensors to simply speak commands such as "Netflix, fast forward," or to use their hands to control some of the streaming video functions. Futurists will be a bit disappointed, … [Read more...]
174 million online viewers
YouTube and the other Google sites logged almost 2 billion online viewing sessions in March, comScore reports. Overall, 174 million U.S. Internet users watched online video content last month, with the average viewer taking in 14.8 hours of online content. Most of the major metrics showed improvement from February (28 days) to March (31 … [Read more...]
Lumet & Chayefsky’s anti-social ‘Network’
"I think I'd like to be an angry prophet denouncing the hypocrisies of our time," fallen news anchor Howard Beale tells co-workers in the opening minutes of the media-bashing masterpiece "Network." Director Sidney Lumet and writer Paddy Chayefsky, equally mad as hell, used their black comedy about a raggedy fourth TV network to denounce the … [Read more...]
‘Topsy-Turvy’ while turning Japanese
Topsy-turvy turned into a downer. "Princess Ida" came up short on charm. And so Gilbert & Sullivan's partnership neared collapse. Such is the setup for Mike Leigh's "Topsy Turvy," the delightful 1999 biopic about the masters of comic opera and the making of their "The Mikado." The Criterion Collection has rereleased "Topsy-Turvy" on Blu-ray … [Read more...]